1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technique for assisting photography, and in particular, relates to an imaging apparatus and a shooting assistance system suitable for an album creation application.
2. Description of the Related Art
When people participate in group travel and various events, or take a trip to an amusement park, an album is often created that not only uses photographs taken by the individual participants, but also uses photographs taken by an accompanying photographer. Especially, recently album creation services have become widespread, and thus the opportunities to create an album are increasing. Further, when creating an album, it is often required that the photographs are selected so that the plurality of participants, which serve as “objects”, appear evenly. Alternatively, when as album is to be used as a gift, for example, the photographs may be selected so that a specific participant appears more often.
To improve the efficiency of such an album creation operation, the following techniques are known. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,787,665 discusses a technique for identifying people in an image captured by an imaging apparatus before imaging, counting shot image number information for each person, and issuing a warning about a bias in the number of shot images. Further, the shot image number is managed by setting an object who is shown in predetermined positions, such as an in-focus position or a position near the center of the shot images as a main object.
However, in the imaging apparatus discussed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,787,665, one person per shot is managed as the main object. No consideration is given regarding the position information of the other objects appearing in a photographed image. Thus, there is room for improvement in terms of shooting support that takes object composition into account. More specifically, when an album is created using photographed images, there is an issue that since the number of the main objects in each photographed image is counted but the number of the other objects therein is not counted, the number of the photographed images may differ among the objects as a result.